Cost Deflection Case Study

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Improve customer experience of Microsoft Office Live Support Community and decrease cost of product support

• Develop an interoperable community platform that consolidates existing content repositories into a single portal.

• Integrate “spaghetti bowl” of support and product sites into single gateway for content and conversation

• Activate customer advocates as product mentors and a word-of-mouth engine

• Drive preference and stimulate product subscriptions

• Decreased cost of support by > 60%

• Exceeded community answer rate (Goal: 50%; Actual: 77%)

• Increased support page views by 77% for Office Live Small Business and 359% for Office Live Workspace

Strategy:

ComBlu’sRole:

Results:

Mission:

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Case Study: Microsoft Office Live

$0.00

$0.10

$0.20

$0.30

$0.40

$0.50

$0.60

$0.70

Telephone Email Community

$0.68

$0.56

$0.24

Support Costs per Minute

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What happened to cause this drop?

Case Study: Microsoft Office Live

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• Support agents failed to answer questions.• The root cause turned out to be a technical problem that prevented agents from

responding to forum posts.

Case Study: Microsoft Office Live

Office Live Small BusinessSupport Page View Increase Post ICSE:

77%

Office Live WorkspaceSupport Page View Increase Post ICSE:

359%

Community Answer Rate Goal:

50%Actual Community Answer Rate:

76.5%

Decrease in Per-incident Hard Dollar Customer Support Costs:

283%

Percentage of Active Users Who Regularly Use the Community:

34%

Microsoft Office Live Results: Exceeding Expectations